Crashlander

I remember when we threw in the bridge hands and decided to go out for dinner. This was more complicated than it sounds. Elephant hadn't had a chance to change to flatlander styles, and neither of us was fit to be seen in public. Dianna had cosmetics for us.

I succumbed to an odd impulse. I dressed as an albino.

They were body paints, not pills. When I finished applying them, there in the full-length mirror was my younger self. Blood-red irises, snow-white hair, white skin with a tinge of pink: the teenager who had disappeared ages ago, when I was old enough to use tannin pills. I found my mind wandering far back across the decades, to the days when I was a flatlander myself, my feet firmly beneath the ground, my head never higher than seven feet above the desert sands … They found me there before the mirror and pronounced me fit to be seen in public.

I remember that evening when Dianna told me she had known Elephant forever. «I was the one who named him Elephant,» she bragged.

«It's a nickname?»

«Sure,» said Sharrol. «His real name is Gregory Pelton.»

«O-o-oh.» Suddenly all came clear. Gregory Pelton is known among the stars. It is rumored that he owns the thirty-light-year-wide rough sphere called human space, that he earns his income by renting it out. It is rumored that General Products — the all-embracing puppeteer company, now defunct for lack of puppeteers — is a front for Gregory Pelton. It's a fact that his great-to-die-eighth-grandmother invented the transfer booth and that he is rich, rich, rich.

I asked, «Why Elephant? Why that particular nickname?»

Dianna and Sharrol looked demurely at the tablecloth.

Elephant said, «Use your imagination, Bey.»

«On what? What's an elephant, some kind of animal?»

Three faces registered annoyance. I'd missed a joke.

«Tomorrow,» said Elephant, «we'll show you the zoo.»

* * *

There are seven transfer booths in the Zoo of Earth. That'll tell you how big it is. But you're wrong; you've forgotten the two hundred taxis on permanent duty. They're there because the booths are too far apart for walking.

We stared down at dusty, compact animals smaller than starseeds or Bandersnatchi but bigger than anything else I'd ever seen. Elephant said, «See?»

«Yeah,» I said, because the animals showed a compactness and a plodding invulnerability very like Elephant's. And then I found myself watching one of the animals in a muddy pool. It was using a hollow tentacle over its mouth to spray water on its back. I stared at that tentacle … and stared …

«Hey, look!» Sharrol called, pointing. «Bey's ears are turning red!»

I didn't forgive her till two that morning.

* * *

And I remember reaching over Sharrol to get a tabac stick and seeing her purse lying on her other things. I said, «How if I picked your pocket now?»

Orange and silver lips parted in a lazy smile. «I'm not wearing a pocket.»

«Would it be in good taste to sneak the money out of your purse?»

«Only if you could hide it on you.»

I found a small flat purse with four hundred stars in it and stuck it in my mouth.

She made me go through with it. Ever make love to a woman with a purse in your mouth? Unforgettable. Don't try it if you've got asthma.

I remember Sharrol. I remember smooth, warm blue skin, silver eyes with a wealth of expression, orange and silver hair in a swirling abstract pattern that nothing could mess up. It always sprang back. Her laugh was silver, too, when I gently extracted two handfuls of hair and tied them in a hard double knot, and when I gibbered and jumped up and down at the sight of her hair slowly untying itself like Medusa's locks. And her voice was a silver croon.

* * *

I remember the freeways.

They were the first thing that showed coming in on Earth. If we'd landed at night, it would have been the lighted cities, but of course we came in on the day side. Why else would a world have three spaceports? There were the freeways and autostradas and autobahns, strung in an all-enclosing net across the faces of the continents.

From a few miles up you still can't see the breaks. But they're there, where girders and pavement have collapsed. Only two superhighways are still kept in good repair. They are both on the same continent: the Pennsylvania Turnpike and the Santa Monica Freeway. The rest of the network is broken chaos.

It seems there are people who collect old groundcars and race them. Some are actually renovated machines, fifty to ninety percent replaced; others are handmade reproductions. On a perfectly flat surface they'll do fifty to ninety miles per hour.

I laughed when Elephant told me about them, but actually seeing them was different.